Chrome OS, The New GNU/Linux Distro Accepted By OEMs, Retailers, Government and Consumers

Combine state of the art hardware from Intel and optimized software from Google and what do you have? A big bite taken out of the Wintel pie:“Chrome OS represents a new form of computing," he said. "We are seeing great momentum there. External analysis estimates that they already represent over 25 per cent of the sub-$300 category. They’re big in education as well; they’re now deployed in over 5,000 schools in the US, which represents over 20 per cent of the school districts.”

This should put paid to the FUD coming from the Wintel camp, that M$ will save Wintel. It’s not happening. Just as Apple could not build a $500 tablet, Wintel cannot make decent small cheap PCs. Meanwhile the world turns and people love small cheap PCs because they are good enough for what people do. Because ChromeOS is essentially a thin client, much of the work of system maintenance is done remotely and users are not generally IT people. That works.

Here, let Google tell you why Chrome OS is wonderful for users.

Of course, Chrome OS is an on-ramp for the cloud and may well end up running lots of non-free software that works against the interests of users but it surely is smooth and will sell.

About Robert Pogson

I am a retired teacher in Canada. I taught in the subject areas where I have worked for almost forty years: maths, physics, chemistry and computers. I love hunting, fishing, picking berries and mushrooms, too.

13 Responses to Chrome OS, The New GNU/Linux Distro Accepted By OEMs, Retailers, Government and Consumers

Also, “Chrome packaged apps save time and money as the payoff for developers is, the ability to write one app for multiple platforms. If we were to do native apps for each platform, we’d have to hire or train new devs for each”

Kids wants things that are not always good for them, as they do not have a solid understanding between right and wrong.

Applies pacifiers are a horrendous thing to kid to a child, what sort of parent are you?

“We really don’t know the full neurological effects of these technologies yet,” said Dr. Gary Small, director of the Longevity Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.” “Children, like adults, vary quite a lot, and some are more sensitive than others to an abundance of screen time.”

But Dr. Small says we do know that the brain is highly sensitive to stimuli such as the iPad, and if people spend too much time Apple technology, that could hinder the development of certain communications skills.

So will a child who plays with crayons at dinner rather than a coloring application on an iPad be a more socialized person? Perhaps they might turn out to be a typical Crapple snob.

BTW, BW how does all that fit in with ChromeOS and the lack of WINTEL? Quit playing the troll card, and bring a real discussion to the table instead of diverging from the topic.

More likely that you have not noticed the ones who have spent some money since you perform such a clumsy effort to reach them. They most likely shun you. I would.

The schools around here buy iPads because that is what the kids want and the parents use, too. These are not native schools in Canada, of course, and they may do things differently.

From a business point of view, there are distinct groups of users that can be sorted into a “sold” market, defined as customers who actually bought something, and an “unsold” market comprised of potential customers who could benefit from a product and can afford to buy it but have not yet done so. This latter segment may be more difficult to reach in the presence of free alternatives such as Linux or the office suites like Open or Libre Office.

There are different impacts of the two groups. The former represents a source of revenue for the product supplier. That is where the money is and that is where the business is most concerned about share. That is what you can take to the band.

Unsold market attributes are important for figuring out what potential growth may exist in the sold market and can help with targeting sales activities. A market is mature when the unsold portion fails to yield new business at any desirable rate. This is the situation, I think, in the classic PC market wherein new opportunities are rarely found and the market is mostly concerned with replacements.

Individual company financials are the measure of how well a company is doing in addressing such markets.

Summary: M$ will not be a contender in the near future of hardware. They will revert back to software on all platforms to remain viable over the long-term. The next CEO will have a mess to clean up and may end up leaving after two-years of headache.

You have your own definitions, it seems, but the article regarding the share of business for chromebooks is in reference to what people have come to know as the netbook market. It is indeed in decline and you can google around yourself and find myriad article like

If you want to lump iPads and Android tablets and even phones into your “small cheap computer” category, then the chromebook share is hardly 25%m more like 0.025%.

Chromebooks are kicking lock-in’s ass

Whatever that might mean in terms of business success, perhaps, but it is doing it quite stealthily. No major articles in the trade press that mention the notion. It does not seem to be making the splash that Tickle Me Elmo made a few years back. If it were, shouldn’t there be some chatter about it?

No, they didn’t. They still ship them and still provide GNU/Linux. So, they are not 7-10 inches any longer. Who cares? They are still low-powered notebooks running at 1.3-1.6 gHz. They do have a bit more RAM but who cares once you have enough to run the browser?

bw wrote, of small cheap computers, “it is the bottom of the old netbook market that has been in decline for a long time now due to people noticing that it didn’t do everything that they wanted to do and so had to have a real notebook anyway.”

The market for small cheap computers has never been in decline. It has been accelerating. M$ tried to kill off the netbook but never quite succeeded. Now that niche has spread to smartphones, tablets, chromebooks, gazillions of thin clients. Meanwhile, the “ultrabook” is struggling. Most people don’t want expensive computers of any kind because they have better uses for their money. I know most of the people here do little more than browse the web with their PCs of any kind. The little woman does nothing but web browsing and some image-processing with her array of PCs. The image-processing consists of cutting and pasting, nothing CPU-intensive. PHP websites do that kind of thing. She does use some local storage but then uploads them to FaceBook… She has no concept of a backup…

You can still buy netbooks and all the other varieties. M$ has lost control of the market for PCs. When the netbook was the only choice for lovers of small cheap computer more units sold but there is still a market for them. It’s just smaller like the market for hair-drying ATX PCs. Why should OEMs stop selling a product that makes money for them?

Further: If you go to Amazon.com and choose Laptop department and order by popularity, number one with a bullet is Samsung Chromebook with 3000 reviews @ $248. Next is MacBook Pro @ $1050 with 784 reviews. Then comes a Toshiba Satellite with “*” at $350 and 38 reviews… Chromebooks are kicking lock-in’s ass.

More like a crumb left in the pie pan in my opinion.
“25% of the under $300” market doesn’t sound like prime pickings to me. Rather it is the bottom of the old netbook market that has been in decline for a long time now due to people noticing that it didn’t do everything that they wanted to do and so had to have a real notebook anyway.

Not too many years ago I remember the same sort of hallelujah cry for Linux when Dell said that a third of their netbooks were shipping with Linux as the OS. A year or so later, they quit shipping netbooks entirely. But the Linux advocates were still using the old press release as proof of some conspiracy to muffle the glory of Linux by the industry press who were in the iron grip of Microsoft, or so they believed.

The history of econobox products throughout the world has been pretty dismal else we all would be driving Yugos and Fiats and squinting at tiny screen PCs in 800 x 600 resolution. People want to have better things than the next fellow and want it to be plain that they have them. The prominent Apple logo on the back of your PC or tablet is ample demonstration of that. It is like a peacock’s plumage. Go first class or stay home.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.